A Study Of The Word Class Labeling Of Synonymous Compounds In Chinese-English Dictionaries

As an indispensable part of Chinese,synonymy compounds have always been a hot topic in Chinese academia.And researches on the synonymy compounds have emerged in an endless stream with fruitful results,mainly concentrating on classical works,language teaching,and lexicography.Word class labeling is an important part of lexicography.However,most researches on synonymy compounds in lexicography focus on the definitions of synonymy compounds in Chinese dictionaries.And there are few studies on the issue of word class labeling of synonymous compounds in Chinese-English dictionaries.In view of this,with the help of BCC corpus,this thesis intends to make an empirical study of the word class labeling of synonymous compounds in A Chinese-English Dictionary(3^rd edition),New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2^ndedition),and The Chinese-English Translation Dictionary under the guidance of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory.This study has found that the word class labeling of 25.83%shared synonymous compounds is inconsistent in three dictionaries.After investigating the usage patterns of 33 synonymous compounds with completely inconsistent word class labeling and 39 synonymous compounds with identical word class labeling in the BCC corpus,I found that there are some problems in the word class labeling of synonymous compounds in three dictionaries.And the main problem is that the number of heterosemous words has been greatly reduced,and the underlying reasons are that the lexicographers are deeply influenced by the Principle of Parsimony.This principle follows the classical logic and cannot be used for heterosemy representation of lexemes.In order to optimize the word class labeling of synonymous compounds in Chinese-English dictionaries,this thesis suggests that lexicographers should label word classes based on the investigation of conventionalized usage patterns of lexical items in corpora.This thesis conducts an empirical study of word class labeling of synonymous compounds in Chinese-English dictionaries from a new theoretical perspective.And this study remedies the lack of research on the word class labeling of synonymous compounds,provides a new theoretical guidance for solving Chinese word class issues,and also helps to improve the quality of the compilation of the three Chinese-English dictionaries.